Storage Devices – A Brief History

Storage Devices – A Brief History

If you think the floppy drive was the first storage device ever created, you are miles away from reality. Storage devices existed well before the first century. However, they were in the form of papyrus and tally sticks. The data stored was not the typical word or excel file but simply hand-written text. The gradual digitization of data gave rise to electronic storage devices.

Punch cards were the first known digital storage devices. However, unlike the present day hard drives, punch cards could store only small bytes of data. In 1950s, magnetic tapes were introduced which could store a lot more data compared to punch cards. To be precise, 10000 punch cards equaled one magnetic tape.

Further advancement in technology was witnessed in 1969 when the floppy drives were introduced. The 8 inch floppy drive could store data up to 80Kb. Soon a 3.5 inch floppy drive arrived with a storage capacity of up to 1.44 MB, and this was indeed a great achievement.

Finally, in 1956 the first ever hard disk drive was introduced. However, it could store not more than 4.4 MB of data. Next to follow were CDs, DVDs and of course those tiny little pen drives. Interestingly, most of these could save data even in gigabytes. But, that wasn’t the end. Taking it all to the next level were portable hard-drives which were not physically installed inside the computer and could be easily carried along.

Business organizations use network attached storage drives which are different from standard hard drives. These are separate devices with their own IP addresses. These are not individually connected to every PC but in fact connected to all of them via a network.

However, that’s not where it all stops. You might in future come across storage devices as tiny as a finger nail but capable of storage almost all the data in the world.